Georgia needs to recruit more offensive lineman

It's summer time, and as such on a college campus where school isn't in a normal session, the athletics activity dries up. Georgia thankfully has former athletes competing at the highest levels in tennis, and golf, and baseball to help fill the void, but when it comes to current Georgia athletics, you get little more than bad news like injuries, arrests, and poor grades, or good news in recruiting.

So today, we bring you recruiting news, and not the good kind. OL Devondre Seymour, son/nephew of Richard Seymour, announced as most everyone expected that he would not be academically eligible to play for Mark Richt this year (the R&B article credits Kipp Adams with ESPN, with their subscription article here). He will instead head to Mississippi, to play at Hinds Community College and hopefully enroll at UGA in January 2015.

As said, this comes as no real shock, since Seymour was always expected to need more time to become academically eligible (as you can see in what Macon wrote when he signed). And with every starter returning from last year's offensive line, as well as the primary backups, we didn't need him to play now. The main newsworthy bit of info here is that Seymour wasn't close enough that prep school could get him to Athens, which would have saved his eligibility clock and allowed him to enroll with next year's signees. Now, he'll head to JUCO to use at least one, if not two years of eligibility, but it also puts him two years away from contributing.

Georgia has what is expected to be a relatively small 2014 class already starting to fill up, but they only have one OL committed so far (Heard County's Jake Edwards). With Dallas Lee, Kenarious Gates, Chris Burnette, and Austin Long departing after their senior seasons this fall, in addition to Watts Dantzler, Mark Beard, and David Andrews only having one season left after this one, and John Theus potentially being NFL bound as a 3 year starter and draft eligible after the 2014 season, one of the primary needs of this class was restocking the OL so we have guys in place when they are going to be needed in either 2014 or at the latest 2015.

Seymour was someone a lot hoped could be one of those guys, and he still can be in two years after say starting tackles Theus and Beard or Dantzler move on. But he wouldn't have a year of experience in the system under his belt by the time he took the field then. The good thing is we're already at our needs at most other positions (maybe not LB), so the staff can focus hard on adding those fat, ugly guys that you need to win titles. We need a handful of them, and hopefully we're gonna go get them (I like 4 minimum per class because the position takes time to develop quality players, and also has a high rate of busts between injuries, academics, and kids that just can't adapt to facing someone their size and strength unlike in high school where their physical tools are overwhelmingly superior to everyone they line up against).

We'll take a closer look at that class expectation later this summer, but the missing pieces are pretty obvious. 1 QB? Check. 2 TBs? Check and check. 2 WRs? Another double check TE? I'd like one more, but we got a great one. A few DBs and LBs? Got some guys there too. What's still remaining? [cue chuckdawg]